Comparing: the Fullness & Emptiness in Progress
The Art of War 6:7.1-4 When you form your strategy, know the strengths and weaknesses of your plan.
This article continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.
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This article examines the first stanza of Section Seven of Chapter 6 of The Art of War. The general topic of this chapter is emptiness and fullness and the forms of weaknesses and strengths that flow from them. This section moves our discussion to the four steps of the progress cycle. These four steps, Aiming, Moving, Claiming, and Listening, each have their own forms of emptiness and fullness. This section introduces us to more forms of emptiness and fullness.
The Odds of Profit
We must consider emptiness and fullness in the Aiming step of the progress cycle, where we pick a direction to move.
In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. My English translation follows.
<Make> <strategy> <it> <and> <yet> <know> <gain> <loss> <of> <plan>
When you form your strategy, know the strengths and weaknesses of your plan.
There is no step-by-step planning in Sun Tzu’s system. Strategic planning is limited to aiming at the best new area that we want to explore with the goal of advancing our position. For Sun Tzu, the strengths and weaknesses of any move we consider revolve around potential costs versus benefits, the concepts of <gain> and <loss>.
Like every other form of emptiness and fullness, gain and loss are complementary opposites. The more we can gain, the less important the losses are. Like any gamble, the better our odds, the more incentive we have to play. Practical strategy teaches us to make the smallest gambles we can, but those moves must always have the potential to make some form of progress. Only by making many moves can we enjoy the advantages of getting the odds in our favor. A single throw of the dice can result in anything, no matter how unlikely. Probability only shows itself over many repetitions.
We cannot know the exact gain or loss of any move beforehand. We can think about the odds, but we cannot know the results. We must make many small moves to discover those probabilities over time, avoiding what fails more often and moving toward what succeeds.
Hold Them or Fold Them
The next line takes us into the Moving step of the progress cycle.
<Utilize> <it> <and> <yet> <know> <action> <non-action> <’s> <administration>
When you execute a plan, know how to manage both action and inaction.
“Action” and “non-action” are two more forms of fullness and emptiness. However, it is a mistake to think of action simply as “strength” and “non-action” as weakness. To keep with our gambling analogy, this is like saying that we have to know when to hold them and when to fold them. We can hold to our current direction or we can move away from it.
We must remember, that in life, our strategy is to improve our positions in the minds of others. When we make a move, there are three possible reactions that matter. Others can ignore us, support us, or oppose us. We can control our actions, but we cannot control how others react or when. We must wait to see what happens and adapt to the results.
All good strategy takes a measure of patience so we can see how others react. When people fail to react at first, it is too easy to assume that we are being ignored. Especially, when we are taking small steps. We must then resist the temptation to make bigger, more dramatic move. Instead, we must be patient and continue with small steps, giving people time to notice and react.
Dead Ends and New Doorways
This brings us to the Claiming step of the progress cycle.
<Form> <it> <and> <yet> <know> <death> <birth> <of> <ground>
When you take a position, know the deadly and the winning grounds.
Here the forms of emptiness and strength are <death> and <birth> in the original Chinese. While, in a military context, this can mean life and death, the more general idea is much simpler. Did our move take us to a dead end position in terms of future progress, or did it open up new possibilities for us?
This is very different than saying that the position is no valuable in terms of <gain> and <loss>. Many dead end positions are very profitable, at least initially. Strategically, however, the problem is always, “what is next?” Positions are a grow or die proposition. Because climate constantly changes the nature of the ground, all positions erode over time. We must move forward and upward because time itself is always moving us forward and down. All states of fullness become empty over time.
Source of Information
This is the Listening step of the progress cycle. Sun Tzu does not cover creating complete information networks until his final chapter, but he reveals the potential problems of our information sources here.
<Contend> <it> <and> <yet> <know> <have> <surplus> <not> <sufficient> <of> <management>
When you enter into battle, know when you have too many or too few men.
With every new position, we must reconsider our sources of information. Here, the fullness is too many sources and the emptiness too few sources. Sun Tzu casts both of these ideas as negatives. Many forms of complementary opposites are spectrums where the problems are at the extremes.
Can we have too many sources of information? Yes, remember, one of the dangers in planning is always wanting more information. The delusions is that we can know the end result if we have enough knowledge beforehand. This leads to “paralysis by analysis.” There is never sufficient information to bring us certainty about the future. The process of making decisions is always a leap of faith. Even after we get a sense of the odds, those odds are based on the past. People, unlike dice, are not consistent. Every decision regarding them is still a gamble whose results are uncertain.
And, of course, we can have too few information sources. Our bias is to think that what we know is the key information in a given situation. We give aspects of this tendency a lot of different names—confirmation bias, egocentric bias, anchoring bias, and so one—but it comes down to one thing:
It isn’t what we don’t know that gets us into trouble, but what we know that isn’t so.
We overcome this problem only by having a well-rounded set of information sources, who see things from different perspective, and updating these sources every time we assume a new position.